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Georgia was the country of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2018. On this occasion, Education Worldwide took a closer look at the school system and general education system in Georgia. We offer you the most important websites concerning

• the education system in Georgia
• individual education sectors in Georgia
• education statistics in Georgia
• authorities & national centers in education in Georgia
• literature on education in Georgia

You wonder what singer Katie Melua has to do with Georgia and even more with education in Georgia? Here’s the story:

Katie Melua was born in Georgia in 1984. At the age of 9, she moved with her family to Northern Ireland. In 2018, Georgia will be the country of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. As part of the media coverage of the book fair, it was often jokingly said that the only thing most people knew about Georgia would be singer Katie Melua.

And what does the Georgian-British singer Katie Melua have to do with education?

In 2005, the scientist Simon Singh wrote a guest article for the British newspaper "The Guardian". In it he criticized, half in jest, half seriously, that Katie Melua’s song "Nine million bicycles" contained false statements on the history of cosmology.

The relevant song lines read:

"We are 12 billion light-years from
the edge,
That's a guess,
No one can ever say it's true,
But I know that I will always be
with you."

According to Singh, the universe is not 12 billion years old, but 13.7 billion. Moreover, this was not a guess, but a scientifically measured number.

In his article , Singh therefore proposes to change the song lines accordingly:

"We are 13.7 billion light-years from
the edge of the observable universe,
That's a good estimate with
well-defined error bars,
Scientists say it's true, but
acknowledge that it may be refined,
And with the available information, I predict that I will always be
with you"

The singer Katie Melua obviously heard about this critique. With a good deal of humor, she actually set about improving this "scientific flaw" in her song, as journalist James Orr reports in the British "The Telegraph" about two weeks after Singh's article.

The new song lines by Katie Melua are as follows:

"We are 13.7 billion light years from
the edge of the observable universe,
that's a good estimate,
with well defined error bars,
and with the available information I predict that I will always be
with you."

She even recorded them, and you can listen to the result here (in a TED talk by Science journalist and historian Michael Shermer):